The Castelion Monastery (Khirbet Mird) in the Judean Desert was
established in the late fifth century by St. Sabas on the ruins
of the Hyrcania fortress of the first century BCE. In the course
of excavations at the site, documents from the monastery's archive
were found in a cistern. Most are written in Arabic, but some are
in Aramaic (Syriac) in the Christo-Palestinian dialect that was
used by the Christian population, along with Greek, during the Byzantine
period. The documents from the Castelion Monastery are the first
Christo-Palestinian Aramaic texts to be discovered in excavations
in Israel, and they represent an important contribution to the documents
in this dialect that have been preserved outside the country. The
Christian literature that was translated from the Greek into Syriac
was particularly important to the development of the Holy Scriptures
in eastern churches later on.

On exhibit are two documents: One (see picture) is made of parchment
and contains part of Chapter 10 of Acts of the Apostles, which tells
of Peter's visit to the Roman centurion Cornelius in Caesarea. The
second is a letter, written on papyrus, from a priest named Gabriel
to the head of the laura (the type of monastery in which each of
the monks lives alone). In his letter, Gabriel requests that the
monks pray for him, for he fears "the tribe" - referring
to the nomadic Saracens that threatened those living in the monasteries
of the border areas.